Where Silent Singers Lie by Chalice
Part I It had not taken her long to figure out the combination into the metal caverns. After all, she had opened them once before, even if it had been by accident, and she was a Runner, the word-bearer, almost as much a keeper of lore as the appointed elders. While history was embodied in them, she was one who helped bring it to life. In the accuracy of her recountings, treaties, agreements, tribes could be won or lost. The Runner must have instaneous and absolute recall, and this was the first test that a trainee must pass, even before the testing of the skill that had provided their caste's namesake. In fact, the races that determined if one was fit to be inducted into the ranks of Runners was held only at the end of one's time in training. Ripplefur had passed them all, and finished second in the races at the last official Gathering two gleamings ago. She walked the rotation between all the tribes, not just the oases between neighboring tribes. She was one of the most favored among the already favored, and had been accorded honors and respect appropriate to that standing. So it was that when the Others had returned, not only returned but invaded the sands, when the fable of the lake of glass was proved to be near-incomprehensible, horrifying truth...so it was that Ripplefur received the first, truly humbling experiences in her young life. In the sixteen gleamings that she had walked the sands, in the eight that she had roamed the rotations, either under the guidance of another Runner or on her own, she had always known who she was. What she would be. How she should behave, and how others would behave toward her. A billion and one things that she took for granted - all called into account by just a few fateful meetings. There were things out there, things happening, that made Runners insignificant, that made the tribes insignificant - and rather than playing one of the pivotal roles as communicator and unofficial ambassador, she was left helpless and floundering, unable to do more than merely bear mute witness. There was a wholly unnatural beep as the pattern she had pressed into the device was accepted, and some alien process was set in motion to allow the wall - no, the door - to slide away with a hiss similar enough to a sand dragon's that it made the fur between her shoulder blades itch to rise. But she held herself still, wary of having the magic that operated the thing go awry with an incautious movement from her, and only when things were still once more did she slowly step toward the darkness beyond. Darkness that abruptly turned to light. Prepared, she slitted her eyes an instant before the lightning-white illumination flooded the room, raised a hand to further guard against it though she did not draw down the sheer *fethash*, made from trap-spider silk, which guarded one's sight against sand or sun but still allowed the wearer to see through it enough to navigate. Or fight. A measure of a Wormhunter's preparedness to engage in combat was the drawing of his *fethash*. Even a split-second's hesitation, the time it took to blink a grain of sand from one's vision, could be deadly on a hunt, and so a Wormhunter never entered knowingly into battle without drawing it across his face first. The saying went: *Sleep soundly when you see the angry Wormhunter glare death, but never turn your back on the Wormhunter who remains calm and shields his eyes.* There was always a subliminal hum that came with the lights, permeating the place. A hum like a distance storm biding its time on the horizon, but losing its patience. A hum of anticipation. The first few times she had ventured back beneath the lake of glass alone, when she had time to ponder the details without distraction of newness or Outsider, she had imagined the cavern as a living thing. Waiting. Endlessly waiting, as patient as the deserts that claimed stone by simply wearing away at them through the centuries. Though the redtail one had explained to her that the hum was from 'electricity', of harnessed lightning running across 'wires' made by those who might have been her ancestors...still, she thought it was the cavern waiting. Thrumming in the hope of having what it waited for finally arrive. Except that it never did. It would never arrive for the cavern. It would never arrive for those beyond it. She paid little more than a passing glance to the flickering, colored lights that had so fascinated her before, instead impatient to see what had drawn her to the lake in the first place. Passing quickly through the sterile first cavern, the floor uncomfortably smooth and cool beneath her feet, she slowed with experience when nearing the opposite doors, and waited just long enough for them to allow her to slip through sideways before she was trotting again. She waited till she was nearly upon the first one before she slowed, and then stopped when she was within an arm's length of it. Coffins. They looked like coffins. Coffins were from the times when the dead were buried whole and not burned to ash in kilns, their remains spread amongst the sands to rejoin the land that had given them life, in places beyond the deserts where the fickle dunes wouldn't shift at the turning of the wind to bare the dead to the merciless suns and cold stars again. She only knew about coffins because Fawnback's strange uncle, who had claimed to prefer living beyond the sands from his memories of adventures in his youth, and yet who had never strayed more than thirty feet from the central tent despite his professed yearnings, had requested to be buried. In a coffin. And so they had duly made one, to his description, and when he had passed on, they had put him in the thing and Wormhunters had carried it to the nearest Edge. Buried it beneath a scrawny, suns-withered tree that was barely taller than they. The Others had assured her that these were not coffins, that those who lay within were not dead. But how could they tell? These...'containers' held one of the People, each and every one, and all of them just lay there. Unmoving. Unbreathing. Cold. That seemed to describe 'dead' to her. Yet the Outsiders had seemed so sure, and it seemed strange that they could be so wrong in something like this when they knew so much. Such as how to fly. Such as how to create another moon, an extra, silvery pearl-stone on the necklace gracing Kettaiha's dark ruff. They claimed to have awakened one already, but Ripplefur had not seen it happen, and even if one of the coffins lay open now, dark and lonely, she could not be sure that they had not just taken the body, and embarrassed by their mistake, refused to admit to her that it would not awaken. This particular sleeper, third from the left of the middle column, in the first row and on the lowest tier, was a female. There was a certain slant of cheekbone, a delicacy of nose and ear, that made it obvious even without the telling characteristics of scent. Ripplefur could barely see her features through the frost riming the inside of the window. The frost had been wonder enough for the Runner when she had first seen it close up, a chill that permeated the thick glass enough to be colder than the most bitter night on the sands. She had shivered in sympathy for the bodies lying trapped within, though they looked peaceful enough, features serene and made ghostly beautiful with the touch of snow on every fur end. Like dew, collected on the tips of needle-trees. With the first sun's rising, the light would brush across the trees like a prayer and set them aglow with a miracle of borrowed diamondine fire. Though there was no light within the coffins but for that provided from overhead, there was the same translucency to the figures within. The tendency for light to go through and refract, rather than be absorbed or reflected in the proper way. They looked like dreams. Part II The female was big, would have stood head and shoulders taller than Ripplefur. She could tell by the proportions, the shadowy impression of the breadth of the female's shoulders, visible just before the coffin became the same solid gray as the rest of the caverns. It was strange, seeing her there, lying amongst acknowledged warriors. Beyond those who were unquestionably talented in an irreplaceable role - such as Ripplefur in the Runners or the occasional Sandtracker that so far exceeded her peers that her worth as Wormhunter was undisputed - females were guarded amongst the tribes, kept close to the camps, the carriers of the future of the tribes watched and protected as the treasures they were. In less enlightened times, long ago, when the tribes were few and seemed in real danger of dying away altogether, there had been raids and wars whose prizes were females. Though Ripplefur had long grown accustomed to her uncommon role, knew since she was but six gleamings old and was told stories of her great-grandmother the Runner whose rite name she had claimed for herself with pride, there was a noticeable hesitation in her thoughts when she considered the female warrior. What were their forefathers, that they built such fantastical structures and preserved bodies in such a perfect state, that, centuries later, they remained untouched and supposedly still kept life cradled within? What were the Outsiders, Others who had lived in the same age that had produced these wonders, to treat female Wormhunters as commonplace, their numbers so large, so impervious that they let their child-bearers stand in the way of danger? What must it have been like for all of them, in the dark times, when fire rained down hot enough to melt the sand into glass and then set the glass aboil, when the People were hunted like animals - what must their desperation and despair have been like that they could even conceive of such a plot, much less executed it? What must this female have thought, have felt, to volunteer for death, in the hopes of being reborn at a time when victory was within our grasp. Ripplefur spread a hand across the translucent shielding over that still mien, shivered as the heat was leeched from it hungrily. To give up life, to give up tribe and family, to so utterly abandon her place in the world that now it seemed more a mercy if the female never woke at all - and to have it all be futile. There was no longer any purpose for her, for the other, near eight hundred souls lying quiescent within the artificial cavern. Nightsinger. The redtail had interpreted the plate - etched with marks that were tantalizingly familiar from days spent on elders' knees as they told stories and drew in the sand - and told her that the female's rite name was Nightsinger. Ripplefur liked it, and wondered what the warrior had done, if she really had sung in the night like sirens from fable, to have earned that name. She imagined what that voice might be like - smooth and sweet as nectar from the kekkitra beetle that made its home in the thorny flowers of janhausin cacti; or low and smokey, like the mist that crept through the jungles at dawn, curling between trees and occasionally rearing up to lick daringly at the canopy? It was a haunting name. A beautiful name. One that Ripplefur resolved to keep for the female Wormhunter, for however long the sleeper let it lie neglected. Nightsinger had shown courage with the one decision that had placed her there that Ripplefur didn't think she could ever match, that she knew many Wormhunters now could not match. Such courage would be passed down to her daughters and sons when they came of age, and would not be lost to the People. Category:OtherSpace Stories